On the Color Blue in Cinema
07 BLUE Léa Seydoux’s blue hair might as well be the only thing in the movie; it is responsible THE CINEMATIC for bringing the entire world into color. words eileen townsend on the silver screen, blue is for sadness, for women, for power, for sex. filmmakers use the many shades of blue to reflect the world, revealing its natural poetry and luminous complexity. Some blues wash over you: slate blue, sky blue, cornflower villain and hypnotizes the virgin. When Frank Booth (played Blue is the Warmest Color (2013) by Abdellatif Kechiche archive blue. These shades drift easily, finding the smooth surfaces by Dennis Hopper) tries to stuff Dorothy Vallens’s robe in af of things. Other blues emanate: sapphire blue, azure, Inter- his mouth, tries to consume it, it leaves him whimpering or national Klein Blue — shades that bleed and pool, that trap enraged. Blue evades him. Lynch’s blue is erotic, no doubt, light and refuse to let it go. Hypnotic blue. VCR screen blue. but it isn’t the color of a woman’s sexuality so much as it is DEPTHS OF BLUE In movies, blue is everywhere, and it’s usually a woman’s the color of a woman’s spirit, her inaccessible depths. color, despite the fact that we grew up learning that “pink is Blue movies are sad movies. Is it too obvious to say that for girls” and “blue is for boys.” Putting aside baby-blue, a grief is blue? The word has stood as a metaphor for depres- sleepy-eyed color for pouty blondes (think Christina Ricci sion for so long that it’s a cliché – “blue nights” or “blue in Vincent Gallo’s 1998 film Buffalo ’66), the true woman’s Christmas” or “having the blues.” But a certain kind of blue, blue is the deep, indescribable blue of Isabella Rossellini’s a steel blue, suggests a complicated melancholy.
[Show full text]